Although investors associate risk with negative outcomes and downside fluctuations, modern portfolio theory does not. For investors, volatility per se is not necessarily bad; volatility below a benchmark is. A stock that magnifies the market's fluctuations is not necessarily bad; one that magnifies...

The negative relationship between stock market P/E ratios and government bond yields seems to have become conventional wisdom among practitioners. However, limited empirical evidence and a misleading suggestion that the model originated in the Fed are used to support the model's plausibility....

Beta as a measure of risk has been under fire for many years. Although practitioners still widely use the CAPM to estimate the cost of equity of companies, they are aware of its problems and are looking for alternatives. One possible alternative is to estimate the cost of equity based on the...

Do investors in the US stock market obtain their long-term returns smoothly and steadily over time or is their long-term performance largely determined by the return of just a few outliers? How likely are investors to successfully predict the best days to be in and out of the market? The...

The standard deviation, arguably the most widely-used measure of risk, suffers from at least two limitations. First, the measure has little intuitive appeal (defined as it is by the square root of the average quadratic deviation from the arithmetic mean return). Second, investors tend to...

This article analyzes the own-price elasticities of natural gas and cross-price elasticities between gas and other fuels in France and West Germany. A model with constant substitution elasticities would not give enough information to study interfuel competition. Therefore we adopted a model...